The story of life in New York City is the story of real estate, and real estate, accordingly, is as absorbing a narrative topic as love: the story of where one lives or might have lived is as compelling as the story of how you met the person you live with—or, alas, no longer live with. That is the premise of Tama Janowitz’s comic masterpiece, Slaves of New York, wryly recounted in the first person by a downtown woman somewhat older than a sullen painter whose fictional name is “Stash”—and whose name in real life is Ronnie Cutrone, who was Andy Warhol’s studio assistant from 1972 to 1982, though he was a hanger-on at the Silver Factory beginning around 1965. In view of the way that Warhol was often dependent on those around him for his ideas, Cutrone played an important role in the later phase of Andy’s artistic career. If Stash is a fair portrait of Cutrone, Eleanor, the “slave of New York,” had her work cut out for her, since not only does he hold the lease on the space they cohabit, but he has a roving eye for sexually attractive chicks. Eleanor is largely penniless—her “creativity” consists of designing original hats for East Village women—so she lives on the brink of homelessness unless she continues to find favor in Stash’s faithless eyes. Whether the stories were a true mirror of New York life in the 1970s, they constituted a metaphor that every New Yorker understood. Unless they held the lease themselves, every New Yorker, man or woman, married or unmarried, was in bondage to the leaseholder they lived with.
Office space, obviously, is a different, less heartbreaking kind of story. But the “culture” of a commercial space is more dependent on what makes real estate real than mere architectural truth. Silvering the Silver Factory eloquently expresses the spirit of New York artistic life of the mid-1960s, and it did not survive the next move that Andy Warhol Enterprises was to make at the end of 1967, when, as leaseholder, he was told that he was going to have to vacate, since the building the Silver Factory was in was scheduled to be demolished and replaced by a contemporary apartment building. The silvering went with the youth culture of its occupants, the music they danced to, the kind of drugs they got high on or addicted to, and with their sexual looseness or uptightness, even their language, if one follows Wittgenstein’s dictum that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life. The space “made a statement,” and the statement was internally related to the art produced and responded to there, mainly underground movies. Painting the Factory silver was the idea of Billy Linich—or “Billy Name,” as he came to be called—who first silvered his apartment when someone administered amphetamines to release him from a sort of lingering torpor that had robbed him of energy. It was Andy who subsequently proposed that Billy silver his new studio, and Andy that gave an interpretation of the statement he felt that silvering it made: “It was the perfect time for silver. Silver was the future . . . the astronauts wore silver suits. And silver was also the past—the silver screen—Hollywood actresses photographed in silver sets.” Silver was the color of the “Silver Surfer” and of the platinum blondes of Art Deco times.
Linich was the only one who actually lived there—he took possession of one of the bathrooms, which he also used as a darkroom for developing the photographs he took, chronicling life in the Silver Factory as it evolved. It says a great deal that of Warhol’s two lieutenants, Billy Linich and Gerard Malanga, Malanga received a salary, however minimal, while Billy Name was merely given spending money. Malanga was a grown-up, a jobholder, identified with the photographic silk-screening process and the mass production of the grocery boxes; Billy Name had the ambition of a perpetual adolescent, living at home, helping with household chores, and making do with an allowance for his personal needs.
Most of those who used the Silver Factory as their “club” would not have lived there. Either they lived at home and hung out in the Silver Factory, or they had money and lived independent, urbane lives. But they believed in the life that the Silver Factory emblematized, of freedom spiced by the license that bohemia claimed for itself. They were often celebrities. A friend of Andy’s hosted a Beautiful People Party in the spring of 1965, where Judy Garland, Rudolph Nureyev, Tennessee Williams, and Montgomery Clift came as invited guests. Andy by that time was himself a Beautiful Person—a star and indeed an icon. But none of the Silver Factory regulars had quite the necessary glitter for that. They were young, good-looking people with whatever allotment of talent may have given them hope for stardom, and who had been brought to the Silver Factory by Malanga or by Linich, who had access to different pools of recruits, or by Andy himself, who spotted what he thought might be talent at the nightly parties he attended.
Billy Name makes an appearance on Ric Burns’s four-hour television special on Warhol, aired in 2006, in which he declares, with a kind of gleeful cackle, that he was the one responsible for the downtown presence in the Silver Factory. He had come to New York in the late 1950s—an attractive young man, lean and dark, drawn to bookstores and a certain kind of gay bohemia, where he made friends and looked for protectors. He became part of a group that came to be called—that called themselves—the Mole People—people of a certain talent, early users of speed, with a taste for grand opera and a marked anarchistic lifestyle, and gifted with a rude and cutting wit, a free and open sex life, and a dedication to mischief. The “Pope” of the Mole People was Bob Olivo, whose Factory Name was Ondine—an inspired monologist and lip-syncher, a compellingly original and bizarre personality.
Here is a picture of Ondine and of the Mole People from Mary Woronov’s memoir, Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory:
Ondine was like the Cyclone—he thrilled and terrified me though I knew I was in an amusement park. Rooms grew old when he left, and after talking to him I couldn’t bear normal conversation. I started going places to be around him, the gayest bars, the most bizarre parties. I was fearless and it was only a matter of time before I was introduced into an extremely narrow circle that surrounded Warhol during the days of the Silver Factory on 47th Street: the Mole People. Mole because they were only seen at night wearing sunglasses and a skin pallor that had to be the result of years of underground existence; Mole because they were known to be tunneling toward some greater insanity that no one but this inner circle was aware of. Some of the Great White Moles were Ondine, the Pope; Rotten Rita, the dealer; Orion, the witch; and of course Billy Name, the protector of the Factory. . . . Drella warned me to steer clear of the Mole People, so I kept my distance until one night Ronnie invited me to get high with them. Ronnie was a rather handsome straight looking but totally speed crazed homosexual whose last name was Vile in case anyone was fooled by his pleasant manner. He said that for the last five days the Moles had been cooped up in an uptown apartment making necklaces, and all I could think of was that they must have some powerful dope to keep that bunch stringing beads for a week. But the real reason I got in the cab with Ronnie was because he said Ondine would be there. [Woronov, 62–63]
In the course of that evening, Woronov, an actress and writer, with a certain touch of sadism and an unmistakable courage, was finally captured by the perpetual Walpurgisnacht that was Mole reality. She ultimately left the party and went home. “But I didn’t belong. I had changed. There were no outward signs, but I knew it. It was no longer them, it was us. Their rules were mine, their insanity my reality, and as for the rest of the world, it just didn’t matter. I was a Mole” (72).
Andy was so captivated by Ondine’s style of wit that he pursued him with a tape recorder for twenty-four hours in an attempt to preserve everything that Ondine said in that interval. At least that is what he assumes. One might be able through textual detective work to identify the actual date—the way one can find out that June 16, 1904, is Bloomsday: the actual twenty-four hours lived through by Joyce’s hero, Leopold Bloom. But of course Joyce did not write the book in that twenty-four-hour interval. Warhol wanted it to be a “bad book”—the way, I suppose, his movies were bad movies and his paintings bad paintings, according to initial criticism. When the transcription of his tapes was given to him, it was full of errors and inconsistencies, but, true to character, he decided to publish it just as it was, saying, “This is fantastic. This is great!” And in a way it is fantastic and great: it really refuses to distinguish what people say from the circumambient noises that the tape recorder picked up, and which somehow got transcribed. Like “Rattle, gurgle, clink, tinkle. / Click, pause, click, ring. / Dial, dial”—with which the book begins. But these are names of noises, not noises themselves, which we would hear if we listened to the tapes. The book can certainly be considered avant-garde literature (the huge “A” at the beginning of the book is obviously meant to remind the reader of a typographical peculiarity of Ulysses). But it does not do what Warhol meant for it to do, namely, give us a sense of Ondine’s wit! Compare A with the voice of “lui” in Diderot’s masterpiece, Rameau’s Nephew, who knows that he is gifted but not a genius like his uncle, though no one—and certainly not his uncle—could duplicate the nephew’s wild way with language and sound, which Hegel transcribes in a passage in the Phenomenology of Mind:
This style of speech is the madness of the musician, “who piled and mixed up together some thirty airs, Italian, French, tragic, comic, of all sorts and kinds; now, with a deep bass, he descends to the depths of hell, then, contracting his throat to a high piping falsetto, he rent the vault of the skies, raving and soothed, haughtily imperious and mockingly jeering by turns . . . a fantastic mixture of wisdom and folly, a melee of as much skill as low cunningly composed of ideas as likely to be right as wrong, with as complete a perversion of sentiment, with as much consummate shamefulness in it, as absolute frankness, candor, and truth.” [Hegel, 543–54]
A: A Novel was not published until 1968. But somehow one feels as if the spirit of Warhol’s failed experiment is what underlaid Willem de Kooning’s admittedly drunk diatribe at a party in 1969: “You’re a killer of art, you’re a killer of beauty, and you’re even a killer of laughter. I can’t bear your work” (Bockris, 320). Even if one takes A: A Novel to be a philosophical demonstration that avant-garde literature, as practiced by a tape recorder, is impossible, he managed to kill laughter. Joyce, after all, said of Finnegan’s Wake that it was written for the laughter of mankind. And one can get from Warhol’s various biographers a pretty good sense of Ondine’s wit. On page 190 of A: A Novel, one can get a sense of Ondine as a raconteur. But it is an agony to read that far. One of the episodes in Chelsea Girls tracks Ondine through an epic tantrum that made him a Superstar.
One could not be a Mole Person without paying a price, if only because one cannot more or less subsist on drugs and not pay a price. This would particularly have been the case with speed, which gives those who live it a sense that they have no need to either sleep or eat. Beautiful Freddy Herko, a dancer, exemplified the Mole agenda, in that he had an immense sense of greatness, accompanied by limited gifts. Ondine described him as “a total star dealing with space and time and dealing with his audience, and dealing with everything in that little thing called the avantgarde. But that was nowhere to go for Freddy Herko. Herko was involved in bigger things. He wanted to be seen. Fred Herko wanted to fly” (57). Somehow performing a minimally choreographed dance routine in the background of an avant-garde film, like Warhol’s Haircut, while Billy Name cut someone’s hair in the foreground, was insufficient glory for someone whose self-image was as vast as Herko’s. The world ultimately closed in on him. A friend, seeing him dancing out of control on a restaurant counter, took him home. He bathed, then danced through an open window on the fifth floor as he listened to Mozart’s Coronation Mass: fly he finally did. Andy famously said afterward that he wished he had been able to film Herko’s death leap. But Herko’s mind and soul had become entirely engaged with bead stringing, the Mole Person’s defining occupation. Everyone knew that, in the value scheme of the Silver Factory, he had done the right thing.
Slightly older, and as manic as any Mole but probably too old to be a Mole Person herself, was Dorothy Podber, whom the Moles esteemed as a genius. She said, “I’ve been bad all my life. Playing dirty tricks on people is my specialty.” Warhol wanted to put her into a film. Instead, she enacted a kind of happening, which was the crowning achievement of a life that lasted until her death in 2008. She turned up at the Silver Factory one day in leather pants and sunglasses, accompanied by her Great Dane. Warhol was shooting a picture and was too preoccupied to talk with her. The story is frequently told. Podber asked if she could shoot some pictures, and Warhol said sure. She took a silver pistol from her belt, and sent a bullet through a stack of portraits of Marilyn Monroe, right between the eyes. Warhol exhibited them as “Shot Marilyns,” but Dorothy Podber was persona non grata at the Silver Factory from that point on. The episode was inseparable from her life, and it was the main remembrance in her obituary.
Valerie Solanas, Warhol’s failed assassin, was not a Mole Person. Her craziness was of another order. The new Factory—no longer the Silver Factory, since its shiny décor belonged to an era now past—was intended to screen out the kind of person the Mole People exemplified. By 1968, Warhol’s inner administrative circle had changed. It now consisted of Fred Hughes, who sold Warhol’s art at something like its market value, and who got portrait commissions for Andy, which he used to finance his movies; and Paul Morrissey, who more or less took over the filming and steered Warhol’s movies into an increasingly narrative direction, beginning with My Hustler. Gerard Malanga was in disgrace, and Billy Name was more and more marginal, no longer clear what his mandate was in the new Factory, now that silver, in fact and in meaning, was passé. The day of the Mole People was largely past, much to Andy’s regret after the assassination attempt: “I realized that it was just timing that nothing terrible had ever happened to any of us before now. Crazy people had always fascinated me because they were so creative. They were incapable of doing things normally. Usually they would never hurt anybody, they were just disturbed themselves; but how would I ever know again which was which?” (Bockris, 306).
The feminist theorist Ti-Grace Atkinson, at the time—June 3, 1968—president of the New York chapter of NOW, truly believed that no woman was crazy as such. If some woman behaved crazily, that was due, she felt, to something that had been done to the woman by some man. It was a feminist version of the liberal explanation of crime: that human beings are caused to be criminals by external, economic circumstances. Years later, she said, wryly, that Valerie Solanas taught her otherwise. She really was crazy to the core.
Solanas was an educated woman. She majored in psychology at the University of Maryland, where she came to the view that men were genetically defective, lacking a crucial chromosome. She was, or believed she was, sexually molested by her father, who administered oral sex when she was a child. She had a child when she was in high school.
Steven Watson, who wrote Factory-Made: Warhol and the Sixties, tracked down her high school yearbook, where she was praised for her brainpower and her spirit. Oddly, her views were not that different from Atkinson’s: men were defective, not women. Solanas formed a society called SCUM—an acronym for “Society for Cutting Up Men”—and in a manifesto, unread until she became a celebrity, she explains on genetic grounds that society would not be good until the men were eliminated. (That was not, of course, Atkinson’s view.) She was a lesbian, and eked out a living by posing with other women, performing sex.
The story of her involvement with Warhol has frequently been told. In 1967, she phoned him, offering a film script with the title Up Your Ass, which proved to be too dirty even for him. He actually imagined that she may have been a female cop, engaged in an act of entrapment. He then seems to have lost the script. Solanas pestered him for money. Warhol’s response was to offer her money for acting in his current film, I, a Man, in which she actually performed with considerable if gross wit. In any case, Solanas’s resentment was not extinguished, and she persisted in her demands that the hopelessly lost script be returned. By June 3, she made up her mind to punish him. She waited for him to arrive at the new Factory, and even rode up in the elevator with him, wearing makeup and a heavy fleece-lined coat, with a handgun in each pocket. The heaviness of the coat was doubtless intended to disguise the presence of the weapons, rather than to call attention to itself, which of course it did. (A suspect in the London subway bombings was killed precisely because he was wearing an unseasonably heavy coat!)
No one in the Factory thought of Valerie as someone to be frightened of, which confirms Warhol’s view that crazy people do not as a general rule do much harm to others. To any reasonable person, Valerie was just a nuisance. And Valerie made no threats, gave no warning. She merely opened fire, missing Warhol on the first shot, then firing into his body when he threw himself under his desk. Valerie shot Mario Amayo, an art professional who lived part of the time in London, and she hesitated whether to shoot Fred Hughes. The elevator opened and Hughes said, “There’s the elevator. Just leave!” And Valerie left, leaving chaos in the Factory, and uncertainty as to whether Warhol would live. She surrendered herself at seven that evening, to a traffic policeman. She shot Andy Warhol, she explained, because he had too much control over her life.
At her hearing, Solanas was praised by high-ranking feminists, like Atkinson, who called her the “first outstanding champion of women’s rights.” Atkinson came from southern aristocracy, and knew how to behave in high circles. Betty Friedan felt that she had left the New York chapter of NOW in good hands when she managed to get Atkinson elected president. She was a feminist revolutionary with elegant manners. So it came as a shock when Friedan read in the New York Times that Atkinson, speaking as the head of the chapter, defended Solanas in court. Valerie was unrepentant: she even demanded that Warhol pay her $20,000 for her papers. She spent the rest of her life in and out of prison and mental institutions, and said that she could always pursue Warhol again.
Warhol actually died—or was clinically dead—until brought back to life by open-heart massage.
Solanas’s bullet could scarcely have done more harm: the bullet went in through his right side, passed through his lung, ricocheted through his throat, gallbladder, liver, spleen, and intestines, leaving a huge hole in his left side. There are some famous images of his scars, by Richard Avedon and the great portraitist Alice Neel. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated the night of Valerie’s arraignment, driving the attack on Andy off the front page. (Kennedy’s assassination, along with the fatal shooting of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, gave the world the impression that everything was falling apart in 1968. That and the student riots in New York and Paris in April and May.)
Warhol spent part of his convalescence editing Lonesome Cowboys. Ironically, John Schlesinger’s Academy Award-winning Midnight Cowboy appropriates some of Warhol’s ideas, especially the romanticized idea of the hustler—and even incorporates what would have been seen as a “Warhol Party,” actually using certain Warhol characters to play parts in it, with Viva playing the role of underground filmmaker. Morrissey made an underground parody of Midnight Cowboy, involving a hustler, and called it a tribute to John Ford. For a friendly moment, there was a dialogue between underground and Hollywood cinema, which in the end meant something to insiders, but it came to very little, mainly because the underground film movement was itself on the way out.
It is hardly matter for wonder that Warhol should have come through the experience a shaken man. He really feared a chance encounter with Valerie Solanas on the street. He poignantly said that he had never been afraid before, but that now he wasn’t sure, having gone through a death, whether he was really alive. “Like I can’t say hello or good bye to people. Life’s like a dream” (Bockris, 311). He was no longer allowed to take Obitrol, the appetite suppressant that was a mild amphetamine. Whether or not his giving up drugs at this point in his life explains things, it is widely conceded that the shooting marked a profound change in his life as an artist. He was a different person after dying, to put the matter somewhat surrealistically. That leaves the question that is impossible to answer, namely, how great a role in Warhol’s art can we explain through even the mild level of amphetamines he took between 1961 and 1968? Since many in his circle were on amphetamines during those years, are we to say that the Age of Warhol is the Age of Speed? It does not help to say that he took so little and did so much—or perhaps it does. Billy Name took dilute amounts of the drug—and how much good did it do him? Subtracting the amphetamines leaves the difference between Warhol as a genius and Billy Name as muddlehead intact.
It is worth asking oneself how many other American artists would have made headlines had they been shot. The New York Post informed its readers that “Andy Warhol Fights for Life,” on the assumption that its readers would know who was being talked about, and would have bought a copy of the paper to find out more. Of no other artist in America would this have been true. The Post’s readers would have known that he was the guy who painted Campbell’s Soup Cans. Even if he had given up painting, he remained an artist in the public mind. The fact that he now made movies instead of paintings meant that he was an artist who made movies. He had expanded the concept of the artist as someone who no longer limited his product to one particular medium. There would have been no other American artist of whom something like that was true. He really reinvented the concept of the artist as free to use whatever medium presented itself. Even the most creative artists lived conventional artists’ lives in comparison with his. He persisted in his view that painting, in his own case at least, was a finished phase, without this meaning that he was not continuing to be an artist. He had simply found ways of continuing to be an artist who no longer painted. That did not mean that he felt comfortable about where he was, as Leo Castelli said about him. It just meant that feeling comfortable was no part of being an artist as he understood it.
In 1970, he discussed the idea of a traveling retrospective exhibition with the curator John Coplans of the Pasadena Museum of Art. It was to conclude its itinerary at the Whitney Museum of Art in spring 1971. He pointedly excluded from the retrospective what Donna di Salvo designated “Hand Painted Pop,” which included the work that he showed a decade earlier in the window at Bonwit’s. He wanted it to contain series only, like the soup can and the grocery boxes, the portraits of icons and the images of disasters, and, finally, the Flower paintings. It was as though, after all, he was what he said he wanted to be—a machine: a machine that produced not single works, but only series. So what was he to do now? In a way, Warhol seems to have sensed that the 1960s were over, and that the decade newly entered upon was a kind of blank. In fairness, it must be said that no one quite seemed to know what was next. Painting, as people liked to say, was in trouble. Eric Fischl, a student in 1970 at Cal Arts, recalls that the faculty looked to the students to say where art was headed and what it should be. Drawing, for example, was frowned upon, though there was no clear sense of what was to take its place. Fischl described the atmosphere in what was one of the most advanced art schools of the time:
It was about 1970, the peak of crazed liberal ideas about education and self-development. Do your own thing. No rules. No history. We had this drawing class that Allan Hacklin had put together. I arrived late. It started around nine or ten in the morning, but I couldn’t get there until eleven. I walked into the studio and everybody was naked. Right! Everybody was naked. Half the people were covered with paint. They rolled around on the ground, on pieces of paper that they had torn off a roll. The two models were sitting in the corner absolutely still, bored to tears. Everybody else was throwing stuff around and had climbed up onto the roof and jumped into buckets of paint. It was an absolute zoo. [Kuspit, 33]
The art schools of America stopped, in effect, teaching skills. The assumption was that it was up to the students to somehow determine what kind of artists they would become. They would learn what they needed to in order to realize their ideas as art. The art school “crit” replaced the course of instruction: the student defended his or her current work in a kind of consciousnessraising session. Everything was accepted so long as the student could justify it in a crit—everything, at least, except painting, which the decade impugned just as Warhol had done in 1965, and which seemed not to meet the needs of a new generation of artists, much of it now consisting of women, for whom painting was associated with the heavy machismo that Abstract Expressionist culture generated. Jackson Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner—herself of course a major figure in that movement, said, at the end of her career, according to sympathetic critic Anne Wagner, “I’m a product of this civilization, and, you might say that the whole civilization and culture is macho.” The confession has the logical form of an enthymeme: a major and a minor premise, with an unstated conclusion, viz., “I, though a woman, am macho.” As if she needed to be macho herself in order to survive as a painter. Women in the 1970s did not feel that way at all. In a major show of women artists in the mid-1980s, the subtitle of which was “Women Artists Enter the Mainstream,” it was clear that the mainstream was something that was being reconstructed in such a way as to be more accommodating to what was believed to be a feminine sensibility. In the exhibition that Barbara Rose mounted of Krasner’s work in the mid-1980s at the Museum of Modern Art, there were photographs of her paintings in her living space, with plants and patterned slipcovers. But in the MoMA show itself, the paintings themselves were in the flagrant white cubes of its harsh galleries, as if an exhibition was an arena, and art a situation of ordeal, a rite of passage, that paintings had to be able to stand up against. The curator of painting, William Rubin, even stripped paintings of their frames! They had to brazen it out, like naked wrestlers in the gymnasium. Art had no place in life.
The increasing presence of women in the art force through the 1970s and after was not the only complicating factor in the art of that decade. There was also pressure from various racial and ethnic groups for recognition of their art by the defining institutions of the art world, most importantly by the museum. Multiculturalism inevitably diversified the curriculum of art history and the exhibitional programs of museums and galleries. The art world was growing into something that would barely have been recognized in the 1960s, let alone the 1950s, when Abstract Expressionism reigned supreme. It did not lack a logic, but the logic of art and of art appreciation became contested at every point, as more and more became allowed. In 1960 the great critic Clement Greenberg published an influential paper titled “Modernist Painting.” Greenberg’s thesis was that each art was beginning to inquire into what was essential to its defining medium. Greenberg thought that painting was becoming more and more pure, in the sense that it was more and more true to its essence. But the very reverse was to take place in the 1970s. A kind of “impurity” began to overtake artistic production. Warhol turned out to have been exceedingly advanced in this. He was the first contemporary artist to consider wallpaper a legitimate artist’s product. His “Silver Clouds” pioneered inflatable sculpture. Nothing could have been more heterogeneous then the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” with music, dance, and film all mixed together and raised to the highest decibel. Painting would have seemed an entirely retrograde move for someone who emblematized advanced art. If, that is to say, Warhol was going to paint again, it was going to have to mean something different than painting had meant even in his own incredibly heterogeneous oeuvre.
Inasmuch as most speakers of the language think of easel paintings when they think of art, it is curious that this genre of painting has been deemed obsolescent by members of the avantgarde for much of the Modernist era. “Painting is washed up,” Marcel Duchamp said to his companions Fernand Léger and Constantin Brancusi at an aeronautical exhibition in Paris in 1911, where they were admiring an airplane propeller: “Can you paint anything as beautiful as that?” Soviet artists after the Russian Revolution asked what role they were to play in the new society, for which painting was deemed unsuitable. The Mexican muralists denounced easel painting in favor of huge painted walls with heroic messages addressed to The People. In the early 1980s, heavy thinkers in the New York art world proclaimed the death of painting, as well as of the institution in which painting was mainly enshrined, namely the museum of fine art. But when it became evident in that era that, through a number of breakthroughs by Duchamp, Warhol, and Beuys, art could look like or be anything at all, it gradually became evident that there was no reason to exclude paintings from consideration, and in today’s pluralistic art world, excluding paintings from major exhibitions like the Whitney Biennial seems merely curatorial caprice. The painting wars are over, leaving it a question of art-historical explanation why they ever raged at all. Though Warhol continued to make movies through the 1970s, he returned abruptly to painting in 1972, when he began a series of portraits of Chairman Mao in large numbers and in various sizes.
In February 1972, Mao Tse-tung encouraged President Nixon to visit China, and this was widely seen as a step toward easing the Cold War. Only someone with a solid anti-Communist reputation would have dared undertake this journey, and Nixon is credited with having made an exceedingly bold gesture. Warhol painted portraits of both these world historical figures. As described in chapter 4, Nixon is depicted with a green complexion and fangs, and the injunction “Vote for McGovern” is lettered along the bottom. The Mao paintings, by contrast, have a benign blandness, based on an exceedingly familiar image—the picture of Mao’s features that was used as frontispiece of “The Little Red Book” of quotations from the leader of China in the role of sage. Warhol modified the image by making it look as if Mao is wearing lipstick and eye shadow, like (what I assume to be an allusion to) a raging queen. Warhol was often portrayed as a transvestite in Chris Makos’s photographs of him, and in a jocular interjection reported in Victor Bockris’s biography, he says that lipstick for both men and women is one of the rights demanded in his film Women in Revolt, starring the three chief transvestites of the Silver Factory—Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, and Jackie Curtis.
Andy had a profound view on transvestism:
Among other things, drag queens are ambulatory archives of ideal movie star womanhood. I’m fascinated by boys who spend their lives trying to be complete girls, because they have to work so hard—double time—getting rid of all the telltale male signs and drawing in all the female signs. I’m not saying it’s not self-defeating and self-destructive, and I’m not saying it’s not possibly the single most absurd thing a man can do with his life. What I’m saying is, it’s very hard work to look like the complete opposite of what nature made you and then to be an imitation woman of what was only a fantasy woman in the first place. [Warhol and Hackett, 317–18]
Meanwhile, it is impossible to decide whether the Mao portraits are supposed to show him actually wearing lipstick, or if that is just a mannerism of his style of portraiture. My sense is that Warhol really did not see why men did not have the right to make themselves up to look better than nature made them, just as women do—and that he himself claimed that right by using makeup when he went out.
As with his popular Flower paintings, Warhol produced his Mao portraits in all sizes and prices, so that anyone could purchase a Mao painting to suit his means, including four giant Maos, seventeen by thirteen feet, impressive enough to make a powerful statement at a rally in Tiananmen Square. As this is being written, the one remaining giant Mao in private hands has been sent to an auction in Hong Kong, where speculation is that it may bring $120 million, outselling Andy’s Green Car Crash, which sold for over $80 million in 2007. But he also produced Mao s in small and medium sizes, and even printed rolls of wallpaper consisting of iterated Mao s. The Chairman’s face was not simply silk-screened onto panels: Warhol enlivened the surface with spontaneous brushstrokes so that they had the look—they were hand-painted Pop.
The final transformation was astonishing. What Warhol had managed to do was to detoxify one of the most frightening political images of the time. Until Warhol appropriated Chairman Mao’s face, to hang a picture of Chairman Mao was not merely to make a political statement. It was to make a declaration of faith. No institution in America would have faced the suspicion of subversion that hanging a portrait of China’s most powerful radical leader entailed. It would be like hanging a portrait of Karl Marx or Joseph Stalin. Warhol managed to transform this awesome image into something innocuous and decorative. Anyone could hang one—or ten—Maos without fear of offending anyone, or suggesting that he held dangerous and revolutionary ideas. Imagine a young student, excited by the ideas that were taken up by the Red Guards in China, bringing home a poster of Chairman Mao to hang in his bedroom, being shown his parents’ new Warhol—a benign portrait of Mao over the fireplace, next to one of Andy’s soup cans, in a living room whose walls were covered in green and purple cow’s-head wallpaper! Andy had a smallish Mao on his bed table in his town house on Sixty-sixth Street, off Madison Avenue.
Andy made approximately two thousand Mao portraits, restoring the Factory to something like the mass-production entity it had been for a time when he and Malanga were turning out hundreds of grocery boxes. But the imaginativeness of their variety of color and the mock impulsiveness of the brushstrokes was a preparation for the style of portraiture that was to become Andy’s signature way of representing celebrities, and those who want to look like celebrities. There is room for serious scholarship addressed to the evolution of the Warhol portrait, which for a number of years became the economical basis of the Factory in its third and final phase, when potential subjects were invited to lunch in the paneled dining room of Andy Warhol Enterprises, after the end of the movie-studio phase of Warhol’s career. It came to an end because Warhol and his associates were unable to get the money due them from a surprisingly successful run of an obscene remake of Frankenstein in 1973. Recently, I compared Warhol’s portrait style with that of Francesco Clemente, also a portraitist of celebrities. As greatly as I admire Warhol as an artist, however, I cannot imagine him having an interest in the kind of interiority that is Clemente’s reason for portraying someone. He was a master and, to some degree, the servant of mechanical reproduction, lost, one might say, without some mediating recording instrument. By contrast, “I never paint a portrait from a photograph,” Clemente says, “because a photograph doesn’t give enough information about what the person feels.” One might say that Warhol interposed his camera between himself and the subject precisely because only the surface engaged him. “When you sit for an hour and a half in front of somebody,” Clemente observed, “he or she shows about twenty faces. And so it’s this crazy chase of Which face? Which one is the one?” I think, in fairness, that Warhol would have said “all of them,” refusing to choose. His screen tests, his arrays of photomat shots, were mechanical strategies for not making choices. But Clemente, a worldly man, finds ways of making visual what he knows about a person, in addition to what he sees. He translates this knowledge into visual inflections, presenting the subject in ways that could not be photographed. I know of few portraits in modern art that compare with his amazing Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis. The woman with the great name looks defiantly out over her stunning jeweled choker, aggressively wound around her neck, her fierce eyes enhanced by the green and pinkish tones Clemente has given her by way of a complexion. The portrait is inflected by stylistic discoveries independently made by Schiele, Beckmann, and Matisse, without in any sense being reducible to them. By this painting alone he would be recognized as an artist of stature and authority. The features through which he creates the reality of Princess Gloria have no correspondences in the language of photography. Warhol’s half-arbitrary colored shapes, placed where the defining features of a subject’s face are shown, certainly don’t correspond to anything photographic, mainly because they do not correspond to anything real in a person’s face. That may account for the greatness of the Mao portraits. Do they tell us something Warhol intuited about the tyrant, e.g., that he dyed his hair black? Or wore lipstick to make himself more photogenic?
These questions do not especially arise with the other image that Warhol detoxified, namely the Communist crossed hammer and sickle emblem that a storekeeper would have thought about twice before displaying in his or her shop window. Andy exhibited his Hammer and Sickle paintings at the Leo Castelli gallery in January 1977, and later at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris, which sold out. But the crossed hammer and sickle emblem was commonplace graffiti in Paris, where the Communist Party was strong, unlike in New York, where it was an incendiary mark, threatening and scary to a population that had been taught about the Cold War, and was persuaded that Communism was committed to the death of American values and all they stood for. True, the show was held in Soho rather than Omaha, but there were no demonstrations, no bricks through the window. Displaying the Communist logo a decade earlier would have been as provocative a gesture as showing a plastic Jesus in artist’s pee in Richmond, Virginia. But it was like any Soho show in that era. Andy had seen the Communist logo in Italy, where he was something of a hero to the left. In 1975 he had shown a series of black and Hispanic transvestites in Ferrara, which leftwing critics praised as exposing the “cruel racism in the American Capitalist spirit, which left poor black and Hispanic boys no choice but to prostitute themselves as transvestites.” Ladies and Gentlemen, as the suite was titled, really glamorized its subject, as suited the culture of transvestism: Warhol used patches of color like collage, which scarcely goes with the political intentions ascribed to the works. When Warhol was asked by the press if he was a Communist, Warhol played dumb, asking Bob Colacello if he was a Communist. Colacello said, well, he had just done a portrait of Willy Brandt and was desperately seeking the commission to portray Imelda Marcos, and Andy said, “That’s my answer.” As a business artist, Andy did not let politics get in the way. It was held against him that he pursued the shah of Iran for a commission—but really so was everyone else after the shah’s money, since he was engaged in modernizing Iran, and inviting professors to his country to help in that effort. I was invited to lecture on contemporary art in Tehran, but the return of the ayatollah caused that to be indefinitely postponed. Italian capitalists were Communists—Gianni Agnelli even bought a Hammer and Sickle at Galerie Daniel Templon. Meanwhile, in Soho, everyone was charmed: Paulette Goddard even thought she would have a pin made—though it would be one thing to have it based on Andy’s painting, another if it were a straightforward hammer and sickle. The striking fact is that the logo had gone dead in America—unlike the swastika, which even today arouses chills and anger. That of course does not mean that it has lost its energy elsewhere in the world. It maintains its toxin in North Korea, for example. But at least in Soho, in 1977, it could be shown with impunity. Sol Steinberg said that it was the one painting he wished he had thought of—a “political still life.” In any case, since it is the rare case in which nobody gave Andy the idea of painting what had been a feared and hated mark, universally recognized, one has to give Andy credit for intuiting that Communism need no longer be something to think about with apprehension. Only twelve years later, the breaking of the Berlin Wall put an end to the Cold War.
Meanwhile, the four-panel portrait that Warhol more or less invented has an economic explanation. A one-panel portrait cost $25,000, but each subsequent panel cost substantially less, so that the fourth panel was $5,000. It was a considerable bargain, difficult to resist. Ultimately, Warhol’s subjects were not celebrities but those who could afford to be painted as if they were celebrities, with the full four panels. I did meet one of his subjects, whose portrait, so she told me, was the last one he did. She said that he kept talking about her skin. Over and over he complimented her on her skin. If nothing else, it shows that his preoccupations of the Bonwit Teller window remained with him throughout his life: his red nose, his pitted complexion, and whatever else it was that made his outward look a torment to him. In his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol he wrote: “If someone asked me, ‘What’s your problem?’ I’d have to say skin.”